Knowledge Base

A friend of mine has an old, Windows Vista-era consumer-level computer that does somehow have 6 GB of RAM. The system is running Windows 10, extremely slowly. My friend asked me for advice about what sort of computer to replace it, or what could possibly be done to the existing computer.

I brought over a Xubuntu 20.04.3 live image flashed to a 2GB usb drive. The first thing we noticed is that Xfce is way more responsive than the Windows 10 environment on that exact hardware.

The first thing my friend wanted to test was the software from TeachingTextbooks.com. I've never heard of it before; it's a elementary school-focused site and software. The thick client is of course a thin wrapper that downloads the lesson assets, usually images and some videos. It gets installed from a .msi, which wine handles like a champ. The software itself thankfully runs just fine, too! (As always, I needed to add the i386 architecture to dpkg.)

Disney+ and Netflix both worked in official Mozilla Firefox on Ubuntu, which shocked me! I didn't dig into if this was already the snap version of Firefox; it doesn't matter to the user, of course.

We ran out of disk space in the live environment for the Minecraft installer. I'm quite confident that Minecraft java edition runs in Ubuntu. Although I confess, back when I played (probably pre-1.0) Minecraft last, it was running on my Windows Server 2008 server.

My friend is ordering an ssd and even more RAM, and when he gets those in the mail, we'll install the software for real and set up dual-boot. I suspect the hard drive itself is the limiting factor for the Windows installation. I had trouble reading parts of it even from my live Ubuntu environment. As much as I hate the CPUs from that era, that hard drive scared me more.